If the Mayor of London intends to become prime minister, he needs to formulate
a plan quickly

It has been a busy time for Borisologists. Those of us who decipher the Mayor of London’s speeches, sifting them for clues about the state of readiness of his campaign to become prime minister, have been presented of late with significant amounts of promising raw material. In a recent lecture, he daringly cited the importance of IQ tests and spoke, seemingly approvingly, of Gordon Gekko, the Eighties Wall Street fictional villain. These blunders suggested a certain carelessness on the part of a big beast hoping to run the country. It is even whispered by some critics that he is losing his touch.

Then, last week, the Mayor of London declared that he definitely, 100 per cent, will not seek to re-enter the House of Commons at the 2015 general election. This guarantee came two days after his scheme to build a vast new London airport to the east of the city was sidelined by a government review, written by Sir Howard Davies, formerly of the disastrous Financial Services Authority, the CBI and the London School of Economics in its Libyan period.

Delivered by anyone else, an unequivocal statement that he will not stand for Parliament would settle matters. But this is Boris. An entertaining off-the-cuff statement by the Mayor of London is not worth the paper it is not written on. Now get ready for him to pop up in a safe seat, where the sitting MP suddenly announces his or her intention to stand down, at which point Boris can say that the call of national duty overpowered his determination to stay away. This could happen at any moment.

Or perhaps not. As increasingly fascinated Tory MPs who watch him from a distance observe: it is very difficult to spot a consistent pattern in Boris’s machinations and pronouncements. While he undoubtedly has one overriding ambition – to get to No 10 – he seems to have no properly worked-up scheme for getting there. Boris, his potential supporters are concluding, does not know what he is going to do next either.

“People who think that Boris is working to a masterplan are wrong,” says a supportive Tory MP. “There is no career masterplan. His approach is free-form. It’s like jazz. It’s all ad-libbing and improvisation.”

As his party’s potential defeat in 2015 draws nearer, this vacillation becomes increasingly problematic for his party. If he is to become leader in the event of Mr Cameron failing to beat Ed Miliband, then Boris must be in the House of Commons at the time of a contest. But how to make it happen in time?

There is the option of trying to get into the Commons via a by-election held straight after the general election, although this would be fraught with danger. A suitable victim – a Tory MP prepared to stand aside for the sake of the party – would have to be identified and the subsequent by-election would attract fringe candidates, be conducted amid a media firestorm, and risk annoying voters who had turned out weeks before for the general election. Boris might even lose.

Far safer, surely, to secure the nomination for a Westminster seat now and combine it with being Mayor? This is not particularly straightforward, either, even overlooking his denials that he will not stand at the next election. The Tories are rattling through their selections for seats and the number of available constituencies is shrinking by the month.

George Osborne has also dedicated his considerable resources to blocking the Mayor getting back into the Commons. A Tory MP jokes that Mr Osborne has an alarm set up in his office to alert him to Boris being on manoeuvres. Indeed, so good is the Chancellor’s intelligence network that in the event of Boris snooping around a desirable constituency, and treating the chairman of a friendly local Conservative association to dinner, Mr Osborne will know about it before they have finished the starters.

It is not hard to discern Mr Osborne’s motives. Boris being back, or on his way back, would spell the end of the Cameron-Osborne duopoly, and, incredibly, the Chancellor is still said to harbour hopes of becoming leader himself.

This game-playing and jockeying for position by the Tory elite could be calamitous, if the result is that Boris is not there to take part in a leadership election after a defeat. While there are other candidates of ability, such as the reluctant Michael Gove, and the desperate Theresa May, without Boris a leadership contest would be viewed in the country as a bizarre irrelevance, a pantomime deprived of its lead.

For much of the media, a contest minus Boris would certainly be Christmas. The Conservatives with a second-string leader could then go back to being covered as the comedy party, as they were in the period between the election of Tony Blair in 1994 and the emergence of David Cameron.

Pre-Cameron, Conservative commentators and MPs attempted to cover the assorted leadership contests and speeches of those involved as though they mattered, as though it was still November 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was removed in such dramatic circumstances. However, the Tories were kidding themselves. The country had decided that they were beyond hope until they picked a leader who looked like he could win.

In 2005 David Cameron was that leader. For all that the modernisers made mistakes, such as being serially rude to traditional Conservatives and accepting Gordon Brown’s doomed economic analysis, their hero when he emerged in 2005 was clearly genuine prime ministerial material. The country and the media were compelled to start taking the Conservative Party seriously again.

Boris is a very different character from the current Tory leader, obviously. The Mayor is the anti-politics candidate, someone who appears to eschew spin and artifice while not being afraid to make a fool of himself in front of voters who have grown tired of slick leaders. Partly for that reason he is a winner who has triumphed twice in a city that leans towards Labour. And as the London Olympics in 2012 confirmed, he radiates star power that can take him and his party beyond traditional Tory boundaries.

At the end of the Cameron era, it will make no sense whatsoever to the voters if the Conservatives have somehow engineered a situation in which their biggest star is absent and unavailable for duty. His pro-market brand of Reaganite optimism – with his can-do confidence and a feel-good sense of fun – would also be the perfect antidote to the age of austerity if he became Tory leader and then prime minister.

All of that rests on him getting a seat and soon. If he does not, by the end of the decade he may find that it is too late, if his appeal fades through over-familiarity. To fulfil his ambitions, and give his party a fighting chance, Boris had better get a move on.